I had breakfast with a colleague from the Graduate School of Education yesterday and our conversation kept returning to how can classroom teachers possibly keep up with what looks like an educational app explosion? How can they carve out the time it takes to effectively integrate apps and other new resources into instruction? How can […]

If the largest library in the world, with millions of books, photographs, maps and manuscripts pins, it makes a pretty serious case for a new type of curation for libraries, learning, and learners. The white gloves are off. The Library of Congress is a pretty serious pinner. It’s an example of how social media can open […]

Looking for an easy way to capture and manage student work and to encourage learners to reflect on their learning? I think it’s here. The developers of the very popular Shadow PuppetEdu recently released Seesaw, a free iPad/iPhone app that facilitates portfolio building. Designed for independent use by students ages 5 and up, Seesaw allows […]

In recent posts about keeping up with news and trends relevant to practice, we looked at harnessing social media in the form of portals for sharing slide presentations and curation sites for current awareness and webinars hosted by talented practitioners. I suggest that if you don’t regularly refer to Pinterest, or if your Pinterest experience […]

Yesterday, Pinterest announced a new collaborative feature–conversations/messaging around shared pins. Combined with the Send a Pin feature added last spring, users can now share and comment on visual discoveries with multiple friends, colleagues and students without having to leave the site or app they are currently exploring. To engage in a Pinterest converation, after choosing […]

In my last post I shared how presentation platforms/communities contribute to my professional learning, sharing, and growth. Also in my arsenal are tools that, in the old days, we would have called current awareness services. These curation tools allow you to follow others who share your interests and to push newsfeeds to your inbox after […]

Whenever I share at a conference, I get asked a couple of questions: “How do you learn about all this stuff?” “How do you keep up?” Most of us did not learn strategies for the type of keeping up we now need to do when we were in library school. New tools for current awareness, […]

No secret. I am a huge fan of edshelf. Not only as a curation platform, but as a source of reviews, as a discovery tool, as a lens on the apps and tools other educators I respect are using, as an attractive dashboard for my stakeholders–with the added value of descriptions, tutorials and so much […]

Tell me if you’ve seen this happen. A classroom teacher or a teacher librarian friend attends a workshop or a webinar about a certain app, masters it and tries to use it, a lot. There are likely better tools for the various tasks at hand, but they aren’t easily discoverable. Pre-service training does not prepare […]

Look, up in the cloud! It’s a directory. It’s a review portal. It’s a community. It’s a launchpad. It’s a curation tool. It’s a playlist creator. It’s an easy source of icons and QR codes. I’ve been using edshelf for some time now and it’s kinda become one of my superheroes for curating apps and […]

This week, The New York Times publicly launched Vellum, an experiment that creates a reading layer over your Twitter feed and flips its focus. Vellum focuses on the shared content of a tweet, treating shared links, with their full titles and descriptions, as primary content and tweeted commentary as secondary content. Links are ranked by how […]

Hi folks, Brenda Boyer, Della Curtis and I are finishing up our upcoming ALA book project on curation and there’s a missing piece we need your help with. We’d like to know about how librarians (and classroom teachers) are teaching students to perform digital curation. What tools are you using? How is student curation integrated […]

Earlier this week, Gary Price shared news from the Census Bureau relating to its efforts to increase the use of visualization in making data available to the public. Part of the effort is this beautiful gallery. The Bureau shares its plan: The first posted visualizations will pertain largely to historical population data, building on prior […]

In working on a long piece about how youth services librarians are using Pinterest, I discovered the work of K.C. Boyd, who leverages social media to promote the image of her school, to build community, and to archive her students’ work. K.C. Boyd, is the Library Media Specialist at the Wendell Phillips Academy High School (Chicago […]

With its 17 boards (including Best Pins of 2013 and Education Infographics) and hundreds of pins, ASCD has built a huge professional presence on Pinterest. And it presents a solid curation model for other professional organizations. ASCD’s new Pin to Win 2014 Education Resolutions with ASCD ups and crowd-sources those curation efforts. Educators are invited […]

Brenda Boyer, Della Curtis and I are trying to better understand the state-of-the-art relating to digital curation across LibraryLand. And we hope you’ll help us share and distribute this 10 or 15-minute survey among your colleagues and friends in public, academic and special libraries. We welcome additional school library participation and we are especially interested in expanding our […]

One of my favorite tools for curating a breaking story as reported in social media has been Storify. It’s widely used by journalists to aggregate news photos, videos, and tweets. Conference goers use it to grab and archive memorable moments. I found it particularly handy to make sense of the multiple feeds emerging from the IASL […]